Page 65 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

New information about the history of Roanoke
Big Lick to Roanoke from 1874-Part Fifteen

By Richard Mundy
Sources:refer to New Research Sources-previously posted

In this installment, racial tensions are not easily resolved. Crime continues until some serious
attention is devoted to its solution. Citizens turn their attention to the bars and brothels with
mixed results initially. Problems and Solutions begin to go hand in hand finally, but all is still not
rosy until the early 1890’s. The second largest economic engine, after the N&W, is the Machine
Shops and a drop in business threatened its very existence (also included in this installment).

This installment became too long to include the Opera House and the ‘Decennial’ which was a
fancy way of saying that Roanoke was now 10 years. To that end, a celebration unlike any other
captivated the city as well as the national press.

Sometimes we forget the historic importance of our town that enchanted the entire country for a
time, that has rarely been seen since. All this in the next installment.

Newspaper accounts of mayhem and violence on Railroad Avenue appeared in a steady
stream throughout the 1880s and reached a crescendo in 1890. That February, for example,
police found a well-dressed visitor unconscious in an alley behind one of the saloons. Swindlers
had drugged and robbed him, a tactic used frequently on out-of-towners who wandered into the
area. “This part of the city,” one paper warned, “is becoming very obnoxious to all respectable
citizens and a person carries his life in his hands who ventures there in the night time.”

Crime and other forms of lawlessness ran rampant through the town during this period. Mayor
Trout and the council began taking measures to curb the violence and tensions.

Salem Avenue had become the ‘Red-Light District’ of the town, crowded with bars and brothels.
Most brothels in town were race specific, with white or black females running houses inhabited
exclusively by white or black prostitutes, but in at least a few cases, white “landladies” managed
all black or “octoroon” “bagnios” in Gainsborough. The bordellos recruited “inmates,” according
to one reporter, by preying on females traveling aboard trains alone or by offering single women
new to the city a free place to stay.

Although Roanoke papers published the names of women arrested for prostitution, they seldom
bothered to include details about them unless they could do so as a warning. When women
working in bordellos killed themselves, for instance, local papers usually put a sensationalistic
account of the event on their front page. After an “inmate of a disreputable house” named Nellie
Hendricks shot herself in the head, for example, The Roanoke Times reported that she was
from Campbell County, Virginia, and had been married and living in Jacksonville, Florida,
before deserting her husband and moving to the Alum Springs in Bedford County, Virginia,